Working at the Intersection of Race, Disability and Accessibility
Harrington, Christina N., Desai, Aashaka, Lewis, Aaleyah, Moharana, Sanika, Ross, Anne Spencer, Mankoff, Jennifer · 2023 · Proceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS) · doi:10.1145/3597638.3608389
Summary
This paper argues that accessibility research has systematically overlooked race as a meaningful construct, treating it at best as a shallow demographic variable while studying disability in isolation. The authors — a racially diverse team from Carnegie Mellon, University of Washington, and Bucknell University — draw on their experience developing and teaching a graduate seminar on race, disability, and technology (launched in Fall 2020 during the Black Lives Matter movement) to build a framework for intersectional accessibility research. The paper begins by defining race and disability as social constructs that interact in compounding ways, noting that people of color with disabilities face a "double burden" of overlapping inequities in education, employment, healthcare, and the criminal justice system. The authors review how technology can reproduce both racism and ableism — through biased algorithms, inaccessible interfaces, and surveillance systems — and how these harms are amplified at the intersection. They then present a four-stage research framework (Formalization, Framing and Scoping, Methods, and Analysis and Writing) for meaningfully integrating racial equity perspectives throughout the accessibility research process, drawing on existing frameworks from Andrews et al., Mack et al., and Kabir. Three detailed case studies illustrate this framework in action: Bennett et al.'s work on race, gender, and disability in AI image descriptions; Gonzales's intersectional approach to accessible multilingual content creation with translator communities; and Hamidi et al.'s study of socio-cultural accessibility barriers faced by refugees with disabilities in the US.
Key findings
The paper's central finding is that accessibility research overwhelmingly centers the experiences of white, well-off, educated people with disabilities, systematically excluding the perspectives of racially minoritized disabled people. A 2020 search of the ACM digital library for papers combining "race," "disability," and "accessibility" returned almost no relevant results. The graduate seminar experience revealed that even accessibility-focused researchers were uncomfortable discussing race, while the broader disability literature outside academia — blogs, podcasts, movements like #BlackDisabledLivesMatter and #DisabilityTooWhite — was far ahead of the academic community. The three case studies demonstrate that engaging the intersection of race and disability opens entirely new research questions: How well do captioning systems handle code-switching in multilingual families? How do speech recognition systems perform for speakers of non-standard dialects who also have speech disabilities? How do cultural interpretations of disability create barriers for refugees seeking services? The four-stage framework provides concrete guidance: formalization requires understanding theories of both race and disability (e.g., Critical Race Theory, DisCrit, Disability Studies); framing demands that researchers interrogate who defines research questions and who is included; methods must address insider/outsider dynamics, cultural relevance, and power structures; and analysis must go beyond demographic tables to actively engage with how race and disability shape findings.
Relevance
This is a foundational paper for the accessibility field, making an urgent case that research and practice which ignores race produces incomplete and potentially harmful outcomes. For accessibility practitioners, the implications are direct: user testing that does not consider racial diversity may miss critical usability issues; AI systems trained on data from predominantly white disabled users will underserve others; and accommodation systems designed without considering socioeconomic barriers perpetuate inequity. The four guiding principles offered — looking beyond academia for knowledge, reducing assumptions about participant defaults, going beyond basic demographic reporting, and accepting that mistakes are part of learning — provide a practical starting point for any team seeking to make their accessibility work more intersectional. The paper's honest reflection on the three-year journey of the research team, including missteps in the seminar and the difficulty of finding relevant literature, models the kind of transparent, iterative engagement the authors advocate.
Tags: intersectionality · race · disability · social justice · critical race theory · accessibility research · equity · inclusion · research methods